Blinders On is the Nickel Creek guitarists third solo album, and it plays like a pocket-sized Wilco, performing similar feats of avant garde distortion upon innocent country-rock songs  in fact, Wilco drummer Glen Kotche contributes, as do Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench and soundtrack wunderkind Jon Brion. Its an intriguing sound he makes, but also one thats kinda plastic and theoretical, with no real heart beating amidst the Abbey Road harmonies and toppling time signatures.

Sawing strings add a jagged spine to Starve Them To Death, which sounds like an alt.country Lake Trout or The Belles gone experimental, laced with sun-dappled Southern California air. (The paw prints of Radioheads experimental years are also all over this album.) Watkins seems at his most sincere on the albums least affected moments: Hello .Goodbye might be a sliver of a song, but theres no fussy window-dressing to detract from its core. Even then, theres an emptiness to his voice, as if all feeling slides off its surface, perfect but hollow.

I Say Nothing wears a ducking, sky-sawing patchwork of an arrangement; Coffee is all treated musical box melancholia, but the whine in Watkins voice can set the nerves a janglin. Upping the pretension level somewhat, Cammac is billed as a sample from the second movement of my string quartet  all 20 seconds of it!

Its part of the uncomfortable mess of contradictions that is Blinders On that one minute it can be playing you the clumsy Roses Never Red and the next pulling out, on They Sail Away, passages of gravity-defying loopiness, like a film soundtrack from outer space. The gently thunking beats of Not That Bad/Blinders On are delicious, but utterly out of place amidst its Beach Boys harmonies, acoustic guitars and piano. Whipping Boy begins like a hipsters Raindrops Keep Fallin On My Head, an illusion it maintains for exactly as long as it takes for the listener to realise that the hipsters Raindrops Keep Fallin On My Head is actually Raindrops Keep Fallin On My Head. Finally, an untitled guitar and strings bonus bit rattles like Michael Nyman gone bluegrass, a noteworthy adventure in genre-bending.

Blinders On bubbles over with good ideas, but seems, in this finished form, a bit random and lumpy. It lands right across the thin line between clever and clever-clever; its no Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, mainly because the songs seem reliant on the trickery to prop them up.